plactagonic

u/plactagonic@f.cz
12 posts · 16 comments

Recent posts

Recent comments

on What are you brewing? · c/homebrewing · 6 pts · 152d

@homebrewing this months photo is from tour of local brewery I was on last week. It is the bottom of the primary fermentation tanks - cylindrical-conical tanks. They are 8m in diameter and 26m high. If I recall correctly they can take about 4 batches which is what they brew per day (in 24 hours, in season they brew 24/7 5days per week).

From outside they look like this:

Outside of the CK tanks.

on What are you brewing? · c/homebrewing · 4 pts · 184d

During this week I got to know this quite odd brewery at my university - the picture above. It has lot of weird quirks because it is just ~150l setup with same technology as 1000l+ setup. It sometimes doesn't make much sense but you can brew pretty much anything in it.

Yeah I will probably be down there quite a lot during my studies ;-)

@homebrewing

@finitebanjo there is bunch of misconception about methanol. If I remember correctly it is created by partial fermentation of cellulose, so pits and seeds left in fermenter in making of fruit distillates. But the yeast just likes sugars more so it is just really small quantity and you just discard the "head" part (that is distilled first) and take only the part with mostly ethanol.

Lighter alcohol is basically made from sugar water, no cellulose is there so no methanol is created.

Also methanol poisoning is bit weird - methanol is harmless in the body but metabolites are dangerous. Basically ethanol is broken down to acetaldehyde that is useful for other metabolic processes, but methanol is broken down to formaldehyde that is dangerous and for some reason likes to damage optical nerves.

Fortunately enzyme that breaks down ethanol don't like methanol that much, so when you drink some small amount of methanol mixed with ethanol you pee out the methanol and process the ethanol. Antidote for methanol is literally keeping you drunk until you pee out all the methanol.

I hope this info will at least clear out some of the misconceptions that you got.

@finitebanjo methanol is dangerous only in high concentration, so distillates. This will be just OK. Beer, wine, mead, cider... just doesn't have the problem there.

Also with distillation it is bad technology or somebody is just an idiot who doesn't know what fractional distillation is.

@finitebanjo yes it is stainless steel.

But it's not fermenter so only starch and sugars (and bunch of other compounds like enzymes but it's not that important for your worries) are present at this stage.

As for methanol it is made by fermentation of more complex compounds that just aren't in beer. Even in commercial brewing context stainless is heavily used for nearly everything, at 5% ABV it just isn't issue.